During the course of abdominal or thoracic cavity surgery it is usually necessary to wash the cavity both to remove debris and blood from the wound or infection and to improve opportunity for visual and digital examination for purposes of diagnosis and surgical repair. The current procedure for cleansing a surgically-opened abdominal or thoracic cavity is rather primitive. A pitcher of sterile saline wash solution is poured into the cavity and manually sloshed about within the cavity to loosen debris and blood, followed by removal of the soiled solution by aspiration. This procedure is repeated until adequate cleansing is achieved; it is not uncommon that 20 to 30 liters of wash solution are required.
This conventional procedure has several disadvantages. The wash solution necessarily reaches all parts of the cavity and cannot be confined to a particular area, which may cause a localized infection to spread to other parts of the cavity. It is also time consuming because the procedure must not only be performed in three steps (pouring, sloshing, and aspiration) but usually requires several wash cycles. In addition, this method poses a risk for the surgeon because the sloshing step often results in inadvertent splashes of the wash solution along with patient's blood onto the surgeon in areas not completely protected by operating room garb, thereby exposing the surgeon to the risk of infection by contact with blood-borne bacteria and viruses.
These shortcomings of conventional surgical cavity washing are overcome by the present invention, which is summarized and described in detail below.